Imagine a material lighter than steel, longer-lasting than lumber and strong enough to support 120-ton locomotives.Now imagine that material is made from milk containers, coffee cups and other plastics that we recycle.It’s called structural plastic lumber, and the ingenious, nontoxic material was invented by Thomas Nosker, an assistant research professor in the Department of Materials Science and…

Out of the 125,000 K-12 schools in the United States, over 3,700 are running on solar power. Three-thousands of these schools installed their solar power systems within the past six years, as solar technology continues to become less expensive and more sophisticated.This trend in powering our schools reflects the growing recognition by district and state officials that photovoltaic electrical systems offer significant financial…

One possible cause of the alarming bee mortality we are witnessing is the use of the very active systemic insecticides called neonicotinoids. A previously unknown and harmful effect of neonicotinoids has been identified by researchers at the Mainz University Medical Center and Goethe University Frankfurt. They discovered that neonicotinoids in low and field-relevant concentrations reduce…

Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science (CSRS) in Japan along with collaborators at Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) have succeeded in decoding the genome sequence for Hevea brasiliensis, the natural rubber tree native to Brazil. Published in Scientific Reports, the study reports a draft genome sequence that covers more than 93% of expressed genes, and…

Chemists from the Universities of Basel and Zurich in Switzerland have come one step closer to generating energy from sunlight: for the first time, they were able to reproduce one of the crucial phases of natural photosynthesis with artificial molecules. Their results have been published by the journal Angewandte Chemie (international edition).Green plants are able to temporarily…

Future global warming will not only depend on the amount of emissions from man-made greenhouse gasses, but will also depend on the sensitivity of the climate system and response to feedback mechanisms. By reconstructing past global warming and the carbon cycle on Earth 56 million years ago, researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute among others…

Scientists have discovered the oldest fossil evidence of agriculture — not by humans, but by insects.The team, led by Eric Roberts of James Cook University along with researchers from Ohio University, discovered the oldest known examples of "fungus gardens" in 25 million-year-old fossil termite nests in East Africa.The results are published today in the journal PLOS…

When dormant volcanoes are about to erupt, they show some predictive characteristics–seismic activity beneath the volcano starts to increase, gas escapes through the vent, or the surrounding ground starts to deform. However, until now, there has not been a way to forecast eruptions of more restless volcanoes because of the constant seismic activity and gas…

Hydrogen is the most-abundant element in the universe. It's also the simplest–sporting only a single electron in each atom. But that simplicity is deceptive, because there is still so much we have to learn about hydrogen.One of the biggest unknowns is its transformation under the extreme pressures and temperatures found in the interiors of giant…

By the 2080s, as many as 3,331 people could die every year from exposure to heat during the summer months in New York City. The high estimate by Columbia University scientists is based on a new model–the first to account for variability in future population size, greenhouse gas trajectories, and the extent to which residents…